1/28/14, "The State of the Republican Party," Daniel Horowitz, RedState
"The big story for conservatives is not the President’s State of the Union Address. It is the broken state of the Republican Party – the party that is supposed to serve as a bulwark against the poisonous ideas propagated in that speech.
It certainly is egregious that we have a president who is brazenly implementing wage controls without congressional approval. It is reprehensible that he speaks of inequality while promulgating regulations that throw people off their healthcare and destroy jobs in Appalachia.
But it is even more reprehensible that we have an opposition party that is hell-bent on rubber stamping Obama’s agenda, while engaging in a civil war with the party base that desires a bold contrast.
Obama is requesting endless debt ceiling increases. Mitch McConnell and John Boehner have made it clear they agree with his fallacious premise about default and plan to raise it, yet somehow extract concessions.
Obama has doubled down on Obamacare. Yet GOP leaders are owned by lobbyists who have made it clear they will never repeal the law.
Obama has shredded the Constitution and used illegal administrative power to advance legislation that never passed Congress. The GOP leadership has made it clear they will never use the power of the purse vested in the House to clamp down on those illegal maneuvers.
Obama talks about the endless need to intervene in the private economy, yet Republicans are prepared to pass a $956 billion Farm Bill, which locks in the President’s baseline for food stamp spending and entrenches the federal government into every aspect of Agriculture.
Obama speaks of the need to make “investments” in the nation, yet Republicans respond by passing a $1.1 trillion omnibus bill.
Obama panders to radical socially liberal interests in order to remake our society, and Republicans are silent on “social issues.”
And finally, Obama speaks passionately about our obligation to open our citizenship and welfare state to illegal immigrants and the rest of the world without limits, yet Republicans respond…..by offering the same! Their alacrity to open our doors and pocketbooks to illegals has already empowered the drug cartels to smuggle in more potential beneficiaries and future Democrat voters.
On Politico’s front page you will find an article titled “Boehner Unchained,” which details the Speaker’s new mission to join with Obama and fight conservatives. You will also find an article titled “GOP Ready to Surrender on Debt Ceiling.” Now couple that with tomorrow’s vote on the Farm Bill, and we have a full-blown crisis within the party.
Luckily, some members are starting to get the message that the establishment doesn’t share our values. When the House passed its version of the farm bill last year divorced from food stamp spending, we warned that they would reinsert it back into the bill in conference. Not only did they remarry agriculture with food stamps, the conference committee gave Democrats almost everything they wanted among the disputed items with House Republicans. There are even some environmental conservation regulations that liberals never thought they’d win in the deal. Members are finally starting to understand that we will always get rolled during private negotiations.
And the reason is quite simple. GOP leaders don’t share our values. To the extent they humor us with some shiny objects it is designed to get the bills to conference so they can inject their real priorities into the final agreement. Now some House conservatives are getting a taste of what a potential immigration conference committee would look like.
We all know that this president is dangerous. We need to defeat him and his party. But if we focus exclusively on Obama and the priorities he laid out tonight and ignore the fire within the Republican Party, we are destined to play into his hands.
But the good news is that reinforcements are on the way. Senator Mike Lee showed us last night that there is still hope within the Republican Party and it rests with competitive primaries. After a vanilla pudding response to the State of the Union offered by GOP Conference Chair Cathy McMorris Rodgers – one which was full of platitudes and devoid of policy substance – Mike Lee laid out the superlative response from the Tea Party.
Mike Lee laid out our first principles in plain language but also weaved them together into specific policy solutions. He explained exactly how free markets and limited government help the very people for whom Obama claims to protect. He argued our views from a position of strength and went on offense against Obama’s class warfare instead of the banal GOP response of “don’t hate us; we’re sweet people too.” Lee unambiguously called for an end to corporate welfare. Not surprisingly, he noted that “to be fair, President Obama and his party did not create all of these problems. The Republican Establishment in Washington can be just as out-of-touch as the Democratic Establishment.”
Lee went on to take Obama’s inequality meme and throw it back at him like a cruise missile. He noted that inequality in rural communities exists from government controlling most of the land out west. He hit Obama directly on administrative fiat and NSA spying. He went on to tie in government-sponsored inequality to government messing with life and marriage (not running away from so-called social issues.) Finally, he offered numerous policy solutions on infrastructure, education, energy, and healthcare.
There are more Mike Lees where he came from, but we will only find them in competitive primaries. It’s time to get to work and rebuild the Republican Party, and by extension, this great Republic."
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among comments at Redstate:
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" 11 hours ago
Here's the problem... here in WA, the Republican Party is mainly controlled by McKeating-aligned "Mainstream Republicans of Washington", who are basically a front-group for the Dems to give the ILLUSION of choice."
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2/20/13, "As Country Club Republicans Link Up With The Democratic Ruling Class, Millions Of Voters Are Orphaned," Angelo Codevilla, Forbes
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"Increasingly the top people in government, corporations, and the media collude and demand submission as did the royal courts of old."....(subhead 'Public Safety')
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"Increasingly the top people in government, corporations, and the media collude and demand submission as did the royal courts of old."....(subhead 'Public Safety')
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"So long as the Uniparty exists, mere voters will have no way of affecting what the government does."
12/15/13, "Breaking The UniParty," Angelo Codevilla, libertylawsite.org
"Yet again, for the nth time, Republican Congressional leaders and their Democrat counterparts produced a Trillion dollar, multi-thousand-page spending bill that was voted immediately after being unveiled, without having been read. Republican 2012 vice presidential candidate Paul Ryan authored the latest edition along with Democratic Senator Patti Murray. Republican leader John Boehner preempted Democrats by preemptively accusing Republicans who opposed the bill of wanting to shut down the government. He topped off this feat of leadership by declaring political war on the conservatives who had given Republicans the majority that had made him Speaker of the House – a war that Republican leaders cannot sustain.
The
Republican Party’s leaders have functioned as junior members of
America’s single ruling party, the UniParty. Acting as the proverbial
cockboat in the wake of the Democrats’ man-of-war, they have made
Democratic priorities their own when the White House and the Congress
were in the hands of Republicans as well as in those of Democrats, and
when control has been mixed. The UniParty, the party of government, the
party of Ins, continues to consist of the same people. The Outs are
always the same people too: American conservatives. They don’t have a
party.
Whatever differences exist within the Uniparty, between Republican John Boehner and Democrat Nancy Pelosi, between Republican Mitch McConnell and Democrat Harry Reid, get worked out behind closed doors. Those differences are narrow. The latest negotiations were over some $80 billion out of three trillion dollars in spending. The bipartisan negotiators did not let into the room any of the major issues that concern Americans. Not Obamacare, not racial preferences, not religious liberty, not endless no-win wars. The UniParty is unanimous: more of the same!
Hence, so long as the Uniparty exists, mere voters will have no way of affecting what the government does.Whatever differences exist within the Uniparty, between Republican John Boehner and Democrat Nancy Pelosi, between Republican Mitch McConnell and Democrat Harry Reid, get worked out behind closed doors. Those differences are narrow. The latest negotiations were over some $80 billion out of three trillion dollars in spending. The bipartisan negotiators did not let into the room any of the major issues that concern Americans. Not Obamacare, not racial preferences, not religious liberty, not endless no-win wars. The UniParty is unanimous: more of the same!
Breaking up the Uniparty, means breaking the Democrats’ hold on non-Democrat congressmen and senators. The only way to do that is to break the Republican leadership’s hold on other Republicans and on the Republican label. That in turn requires using the primaries to screen out UniParty people. Doing this is more possible than ever, providing conservatives learn to hang together before they are hanged separately.
No longer do American political parties consist of organizations that pick and run candidates. More and more, candidates present themselves in primaries, organize their own supporters, and raise their own funds, including via direct mail and the internet. Hence, nowadays, party labels are important chiefly to identify candidates as belonging to one side or the other of the great questions of the day.
The Democratic Party has built solid identification between its brand and its substance. Majorities of Democratic voters tell pollsters that they feel well represented by those who bear the label “Democrat.” Hence that label is enough to inspire a gamut of voters on a certain side of American politics to support the candidates who bear it.
Not so the Republicans. Only about a fourth of those who vote Republican feel well represented by Republican officials. Because Republicans roar like lions but lie down like lambs, the label “Republican” does not inspire people on the non-Democrat side of American life to vote for the candidates who bear it.
To vote for a candidate, non-Democrat, i.e. conservative, voters need assurances that the “Republican” label cannot supply. Over the last several decades’ electoral cycles, such voters have increasingly turned to organizations that promote particular issues (the National Taxpayers’ Union, the National Rifle Association, Americans United For Life, etc. and arguably above all, to the Tea Parties) for assurance about substance. As the party’s credibility has gone down, the issue organizations’ importance has risen.
In short, these organizations, not the Republican Party, are the source of legitimacy on the non-Democrat side of American life.
These organizations are the lever by which voters can pry the UniParty apart. Problem is, each organization endorses and supports the candidates most closely aligned with its own particular issue.
They and their candidates compete against one another for funds and for the voters’ attention.
This disunity is as unreasonable as it is dysfunctional. Diverse as are Americans’ reasons for not wishing to be governed by Democrats, nevertheless there is as much commonality on the right side of America’s political spectrum as on the left. Few dispute that the several issue organizations, their different foci notwithstanding, are all “conservative” in some way. The UniParty will endure only so long as the several parts of the conservative movement continue to pull in disparate directions – only so long as the conservatives fail to draw bright, sharp lines between themselves and the UniParty.
Karl Rove, who set up a fund to elect Establishment Republicans, provided clarity by identifying his kind. That all but invited conservatives to identify themselves as the UniParty’s opponents, to explain that the UniParty has brought America to its current sad state, and to show how differently they want to do things. That identification can be made only by the several conservative organizations endorsing and supporting candidates in primaries and beyond.
Candidate Smith, whether for President of the United States or dog catcher, must be able to say: “I am the only candidate who represents those Americans who want smaller government, who want to safeguard human life, who defend the free exercise of religion, the right to keep and bear arms, and who oppose the government’s intrusion into our lives, and I am so certified by the following organizations….My opponent is supported by the Republican Establishment. What do you think that represents? It represents the UniParty!
It is high time for the leaders of the main conservative organizations, together with the most obstreperous Republican elected officials (present and past chairmen of the House Republican Study Committee, Senators Cruz, Paul, Lee, Rubio, etc.) to consider how and on whom to affix the precious joint certification: “conservative.”"
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RedState commenter, 1/14/14: 18 hours ago
Ok, folks when are YOU going to accept that there is no difference between the Republican Establishment and the Democrats? I mean really, how effing dumb does a person have to be not to see that the Democrats have actually infiltrated what used to the Republican Party? Has Mitch McConnell done ANYTHING to thwart the power or will or agenda of Harry Reid? Has John Boehner done anything but acquiesce to the Reid/Pelosi/Obama agenda that hasn't been Kabuki theater?
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